The Hakuna Kama Mama Project: Producing Technologies of Resistance to Maternal Mortality in East Africa

Giving birth can be a life or death matter for many pregnant women. As a consequence of the high rates of maternal death in many countries, death in childbirth has come to be understood as an unfortunate yet accepted part of the contemporary maternal health landscape. Globally, the high rates of maternal death comprise many overlapping historical and systemic features that are not always easy to disentangle. Adding to the complexity are entrenched approaches to maternal mortality that tend toward one-size-fits-all strategies, approaches that minimize or erase the specificity of local and regional differences. This trend is problematic as Western biomedical approaches often demand that women perform assigned roles and operate under systems not of their own control or making—ignoring long histories, behaviors, and cultural beliefs that have preexisted this moment and have supported women’s authoritative knowledge. As an intervention into this landscape, this discussion introduces an ongoing project, Hakuna Kama Mama (HKM), which expands dominant framings by populating the healthscape with localized understandings of maternal health because African women are often regarded as the objects of expert knowledge rather than the subjects of their own stories. The HKM project centers upon the participants’ subjective perspectives of motherhood in their daily lives because they are knowledgeable subjects who desire to be seen as capable, responsible experts—as mothers and hard-working contributors to their community.